


Jenetia Kills the Warhammer Universe

by Immanuel



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: AU: Jenetia Kills the Warhammer Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-04-16 10:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 6,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immanuel/pseuds/Immanuel
Summary: A collection of drabbles wherein Jenetia Krole kills characters from the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000.





	1. The Queen Conquers

“WHAT HIT US?” Lotara Sarrin shouted over the blaring sirens on the bridge of the _Conqueror_. The ship shook with another impact. It felt like a close range broadside, which should have been impossible - even with the _Conqueror_ at the vanguard of Horus’ invasion fleet, an enemy vessel would have to slip through hundreds of overlapping sensor scans to ambush them.  
  “I’m… not sure, Captain.” Sarrin could hear the frown in the deck officer’s voice. “Hang on, picking up a signal. It’s faint, probably some kind of stealth ship. Wait, no - that’s impossible…”  
  “Tell me,” Sarrin snapped.  
  “According to the scans, the vessel is of battleship tonnage. Nothing that size should be able to sneak up on us like this.”  
  Sarrin brought up the scan data, eyes wide with shock. “Oh no,” she whispered. Then she shouted. “Get Delvarus up here, now!”  
  “Captain?”  
  “It’s the bloody _Serenitatis_.” Sarrin drew her laspistol.  
  “We’ve lost voids!”  
  No sooner had the officer made the report than a flash of light filled the bridge. Sarrin fired off three shots before the armoured figures resolved themselves. The shots glanced harmlessly off silver plate decorated with the eagles and thunderbolts of the Emperor’s personal heraldry. The mere presence of the Silent Sisters sent a wave of terror across the bridge. Men and women that had spent their lives at war erupted into panic as they were put to the sword.  
  Sarrin barely noticed them. Her eyes were fixed on their leader as she advanced on the command throne with slow, deliberate paces. Sarrin felt her hand shake as she raised her pistol again. The shot should have gone through the red aquila tattoo on the Silent Sister’s forehead, but somehow she wasn’t quite where she appeared to be. Another step, and the pistol fell from Sarrin’s nerveless fingers as her heart skipped a beat.  
  “Commander Krole,” she forced the words out through gritted teeth. A last gesture of defiance. “It’s an honour.”  
  The Knight-Commander of the Silent Sisterhood didn’t react. There was no hatred or malice in her eyes as she raised her vast, two-handed blade over her head. There was nothing at all.  
  The Sword of Oblivion descended, and Lotara Sarrin’s head fell from her shoulders, leaving a trail of bright scarlet as it rolled away from the throne. Krole paused only to wipe her blade on the flag captain’s once-white uniform, obliterating the last trace of the bloody handprint that had stood out so prominently only moments ago, before turning to survey the charnel house her Raptor Guard had made of the bridge.  
  A nod was enough to deliver her order. _Find the Twelfth._

* * *

 


	2. Damnatio Memoriae

THE EMPEROR FELL, and Jenetia Krole almost screamed. The twisted face of Horus Lupercal leered over Him, cast in hellish crimson light from the gorget of his black terminator plate. Horus had won.  
  _Vengeance_. The purity of this single thought consumed Jenetia. Unseen at Horus’ back, she brought _Veracity_ up. The Arch-Traitor revelled in his victory. She would have only a single strike. It had to be perfect. Into that strike she poured her grief, and her rage, and her silence. It was a blow to murder gods.  
  The Emperor saw her blade - once His own - upraised. He mustered all His will and unleashed it through the _Flaming Sword_. Swords of Light and Oblivion met as they pierced Horus’ hearts like twin shards of ice and fire.  
  Nothing and everything surged through Horus, two opposing forces impossibly alloyed by the will to annihilate him. The things that fancied themselves gods cowered before the power of the paradox, and Chaos itself fled in terror.  
  “Please,” Horus gasped.  
  If it was a prayer, there were no gods left to hear him. If he were begging for mercy, he would find Jenetia had none left in her. Not for him. Not for anyone. That there was sorrow in the Emperor’s eyes surprised her, but He, too, did not waver.  
  Horus Lupercal was unmade. He was already forgotten as his lifeless, soulless corpse fell to the deck. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. The Emperor of Mankind had fallen. Jenetia fell to her knees by her father’s side and wept.

* * *


	3. The King is Dead

HE WAS DEAD. Enthroned in gold and haloed with power, it had failed to diminish His majesty. Yet the fact remained. The Emperor of Mankind was dead.  
  Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian to the Emperor - though that title now seemed more condemnation than honour - knelt before his murdered king in a robe of mourning black. He had dismissed the Hetaeron Guard from the throne room, the better to be alone with his thoughts. His one thought. _I failed_.  
  A commotion came from beyond the door, the clash of weapons setting a frown on Valdor’s face, though he made no move to rise. He heard the door swing open, and the tell-tale clink of sabatons on marble.  
  “You cannot be here,” said Valdor. He had forbidden anyone to enter. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. He looked over his shoulder, not to see who the intruder was, but to read her reply.  
  _I came to see my father_ , Jenetia Krole signed in quick, angry gestures. Her other hand held _Veracity_ , blade bared and wet with blood. Valdor could smell its rich, genhanced notes. Custodian blood.  
  “You cannot be here,” he repeated. She took another step. “Come no closer,” he warned, rising now and taking up the spear that lay before him. The Emperor might have been unfazed by her null aura, but the workings of the throne were certainly not. “The balance must not be disturbed.”  
  _Do not stand between me and my father, Constantin_. Krole levelled her blade at him, the meaning unmistakable. Perhaps he deserved no less. Duty, though, would not allow him to stand aside.  
  “I must, Jenetia. I can do no other.”  
  _You think you can protect Him? You already failed. He’s already dead_. The words were born of rage, but cut deep all the same. Whether she truly believed them or not, he did. _Veracity_ arced towards his neck, where it met the blade of the _Apollonian Spear_. Two weapons once wielded by the Emperor, and still wielded by His chosen hands. In that moment, Krole had ensured that one of those hands would die here in His presence.  
  The ring of silver blades reverberated around the chamber as Krole pressed the attack. Valdor defended against this first flurry of blows, taking the measure of his opponent. It had been a long time since they had sparred with one another, but Valdor was satisfied to conclude that, even without his armour, he held every advantage. The momentum of Krole’s charge spent, he twisted the Sword of Oblivion aside, opening a gap in her defences for a decisive counter-attack.  
  For the first time in his life, Valdor’s aim faltered. His blow missed the mark. He was no longer sure where the mark was. His breath caught in his throat as his body seized up trying in vain to fight off an attack on his soul. He held every physical advantage, but now realised he had grossly underestimated Krole’s null abilities. Honed to a killing edge over the centuries and unleashed at the perfect moment, it bought her less than a second. It was all she needed.  
  His senses unable to process what was happening, Valdor did not see the blow that ended his life. Where he knew Krole should stand, he saw only an abyss of infinite darkness reaching out to claim him.  
  Jenetia Krole stepped over Valdor’s corpse and approached the Emperor. All her rage drained from her before her fallen father. He looked old, once-dark skin ashen and stretched over dessicated flesh marred by the wounds of His final battle. His face, the half that remained, twisted in a silent scream. Krole took his hand in hers as banks of arcane machinery began to flash with warning signs. She could not be here long.  
  Stoic to a fault, Valdor would have been content to guard the Emperor’s broken body until the stars went cold. His devotion to duty was admirable, to a point, but this was not worth preserving. Not for its own sake. She was in equal parts comforted and disgusted when the Emperor’s hand squeezed back. Just a spasm sent through Him by the machine. Krole left Him with a silent promise. It was almost a prayer.  
  _I’m going to save you_.


	4. Malcador the Hero

MALCADOR THE HERO died on Terra. He sacrificed his life to save the Emperor’s. Some of the more fanciful tales said he turned to dust when his final duty was accomplished. All lies.  
  Malcador the Hero was still alive. He was comatose in a medicae facility that did not, officially, exist. Deep within the Somnus Citadel on Luna, Jenetia Krole sat alone by his side, holding his limp hand in hers. Once, that would have been unbearable for him. His sacrifice had been more profound than mere life. Life could not sustain the Emperor. Malcador the Hero gave up his soul. Jenetia could feel the hollow silence that had replaced it.  
  Seven years ago, Jenetia had first wondered whether Malcador would not prefer death to waking. Could a psyker ever come to terms with becoming a pariah? At the time, with tears in her eyes, the grief of Malcador’s sacrifice and the Emperor’s fall still fresh in her heart, she had dared to hope.  
  Much had changed in those seven years. The traitors scoured from the face of the Imperium. The Great Tithe redoubled to feed the Emperor’s hunger so that Malcador’s sacrifice would not be in vain. Malcador’s condition had not changed. The finest Selenite genewrights had been unable to wake him.  
  Yesterday, Roboute Guilliman had issued the Edict of the Second Founding. Within hours, Titan had reappeared. If there had been any glimmer of hope that it brought the means of Malcador’s awakening with it, it had died with Ianius’ words. _“The tomb of the Sigillite awaits.”_  
  Jenetia sighed silently behind her gorget. It was the only piece of armour she wore, bonded to her jaw to repair an injury there had never quite been time to have properly tended to in the years since Prospero, when a single primarch turning his back on the Emperor had seemed the basest treachery. Perhaps she would find the time now. It was time to let go of the past.  
  _Goodbye Mal_ , she signed. Malcador could not see her hand move, nor feel the pressure of the other squeeze the same message in Orsköde. Jenetia leaned over him and kissed his forehead as she deactivated the life-support machine.  
  Malcador the Hero sacrificed his soul to save the Emperor. What was truth in the face of that?


	5. Mesektet

ONE GOLDEN HAND reached up to the altar, smearing blood on the viciously spiked block of obsidian as Ra Endymion dragged himself up from the sky below. He propped himself up against it with a grunt of effort, feeling the points digging into his back through cracks in his battered auramite armour. Now that he was no longer lying face down in a pool of his own blood, he could see the labyrinth of madness beginning to submit to sanity. Without the daemon to sustain it, the crumbling walls no longer righted themselves, the floating trees died and fell to ground that stood where once was sky.  
  _Without the daemon._ It was a strange thought after all those centuries as its gaol and gaoler both. He felt hollow, not just from the gaping wound ripped in his chest, but a crushing emptiness, as if the daemon had taken a piece of his soul with it.  
  He wasn’t sure when she arrived, but she was there when he opened his eyes. Standing over him in a suit of pristine, silver vratine armour, the Silent Sister was a beacon of purity in the ruins of damnation. It was only when he saw the hilt of the sword slung across her back, quillons embossed with golden thunderbolts radiating from the aquila, that he knew who she was.  
  “Jenetia?” he gasped. He barely recognised her. The Knight-Commander’s head was clean-shaven where once it had been crowned with a towering topknot the same bright red as the Emperor’s mark on her brow. Ra wondered what quarry could have eluded her.  
  _Greetings, Ra Endymion_ , Jenetia Krole replied.  
  Ra was surprised when he was able to read her Thoughtmark gestures without issue. Having the daemon inside him had changed him more than he had realised. Made him something a step closer to what she was. For the first time, he truly _saw_ her. He thought there was a trace of sorrow about eyes that had once seemed incapable of anything but dispassionate tranquillity or cold fury.  
  “I failed.”  
  _Yes. But you obeyed His last command and held back the End, for a time. Perhaps that is enough._  
  Krole reached over her shoulder and pulled _Veracity_ free from its mag-scabbard. It would take two hands to swing the greatsword with any finesse, but she held it in one without apparent effort to keep the other free to sign. Such tales were told of that blade, once wielded by the hand of the Master of Mankind. Its edge was impossibly sharp - beyond monomolecular - able to cleave the finest armour without the need for something as crude as a disruptor field. Able to separate the soul from the body. Able to kill gods. Ra had always thought it mere superstition, but having a daemon trapped inside him had been… illuminating.  
  “I can still fight.” He wasn’t begging, it was simply true. Ruined by wounds that would have killed even a space marine though he was, his body would heal in time. Of course, it wasn’t his body that concerned Krole.  
  _No, Ra. Your war is over._  
  Ra sighed. There was no use fighting it. He lived and died by the Emperor’s will.  
  _I release you from your service, and deliver you the Emperor’s Peace._ With no more words to say, Krole placed her second hand on the hilt of _Veracity_. As she raised the blade for the execution blow, Ra bowed his head and closed his eyes.  
  The Sword of Oblivion fell, and Ra was free.


	6. Such Deadly Prey

The ocean fled before the huntress. Slow, black waves peeled away from her soundless footfalls to expose the single, unbroken sheet of chitin that covered the surface of the daemon world. Jenetia Krole closed in on her prey, guided across the hellscape of darkness and silence by the trace of its soul.  
  She threw herself aside. Ichor too slow to evade her diving roll turned to coils of smoke at the touch of truesilver armour.  
  A hulking figure landed with earth-shattering force. The silence was unbroken as talons speared into the world-carapace. Half-glimpsed in shadow, they were a twisted fusion of flesh and metal, erupting from the swollen hand and forearm of the monster that had once been Corvus Corax. Misted over with clouds of boiling blood, eyes with the seeming of a daemon glared at her from above a ghoulish snarl. Bio-mechanical wings snapped backwards as he threw himself at her.  
  The attack, launched with impossible speed, seemed to slow by the merest fraction as it neared its target. Enough for Krole’s sway to reduce the impact to a glancing blow.  
  Over-committed, Corax skidded into the shallows. Viscous darkness crept up his greaves, coating them in a second layer of shadow. He whipped around, pinions slashing out as though to cut himself free of the ocean’s dark embrace. Sightless eyes widened as they sensed the Sword of Oblivion’s arc. Krole swung _Veracity_ single-handed, gripping the pommel to extend her reach. The fractal edge sheared through an attempted parry. Blood spilled from the bestial primarch’s throat even as the ravenous ocean dragged him down.  
  The huntress reached down, the sea parting to reveal neither body nor armour of her prey. There lay a clutch of fossilised avian skulls threaded on a slender silver chain, and nothing more. The corvia would make a perfect token to anchor his soul. Krole crushed them beneath her heel.


	7. The Undiscovered Country

A NURGLING CLINGING to its master’s thigh wedged its pudgy fingers into a cracked armour plate, tugging at the filthy ceramite as it gibbered insistently. Typhus the Traveller turned his attention to his diminutive companion and growled.  
  “What is it, little one?”  
  **The Daughter of the Anathema!** it gurgled wordlessly, the meaning resolving in Typhus’ mind.  
  Typhus turned his attention to where the Nurgling pointed. Beneath his horned helm, a scowl crossed pox-marked features. The soulless knight waded through the zombie horde, her great two-handed sword reaping them like wheat before the scythe, the damnable blade severing the magick strings that lent motion to the dead. Typhus roared his indignation. A twinge of thought pulled the remaining strings and his newly reborn children cleared a path for him.  
  Jenetia Krole moved a hand in a gesture that made his skin crawl - though not with the familiar, comforting movement of larvae beneath. It was the same feeling he got when others used his old, false name. _Calas_.  
  Spores came loose from the filth that encrusted his cataphractii-pattern terminator armour as he lumbered forward, festering in cracks in the rockcrete paving before crawling forth in a riot of foetid life. Life that withered and died where the soulless knight’s silver footsteps fell. He would not allow this abomination to undo all his work. All the Grandfather’s work.  
  Destroyer flies emerged from the chimney stacks on their host’s carapace, swarming before him to harass his enemy. Krole walked through the Destroyer Hive as though it was nothing. Every drone that touched her imploded, leaving only hollow husks to crunch beneath her feet. The Nurgling clinging to Typhus wailed, hiding itself behind its master’s thigh. _Manreaper_ swung out as the cloud of flies dispersed, its sweeping arc arrested by a swift parry that knocked a new notch into the scythe’s already scarred and pitted blade. The weapons locked, virulent rust trying desperately to claim Krole’s blade, but rebuffed by the unknowable substance that formed its preternatural edge.  
  Using his superior strength to hold the bind as Krole tried to twist her weapon free, Typhus reached for a blight grenade. Its toxic blast sent the soulless knight staggering backwards. The flesh on her exposed crown bubbled as it sloughed away to reveal patches of bone. She bore the pain in silence so absolute it seemed to drown out the infernal buzzing of the remains of the Destroyer Hive circling their host in a living halo.  
  Typhus seized the opportunity to ram _Manreaper_ under her guard. He felt sacred silver buckle and part. The blade emerged dripping with pariah blood. It was, in its way, just another poison, Typhus reflected - albeit not one blessed by the Grandfather. The Nurgling peered out, cackling with childish glee at the sight of Krole’s wound.  
  **Kill her! Kill her!**  
  Krole barely managed to raise her blade in time to prevent the scythe eviscerating her. Her own blood spattered onto the Sword of Oblivion. Blood that had eaten into the tainted metal of _Manreaper_. The rusted blade shattered.  
  The Nurgling screamed. The Traveller stumbled away, horrified. He raised the haft of his broken weapon to ward off the soulless knight’s attack. Wood from the Garden of Nurgle, harder than adamantium, parted as easily as any other rotten branch. Typhus fell to his knees, rotting innards slopping onto the ground. The remains of _Manreaper_ fell from his hands next to the twitching halves of the Nurgling bisected by the blow that had nearly done the same to him.  
  “Grandfather,” he rasped. It would be the last word to pass his cracked, swollen lips. In her presence, not even gods could hear his final prayer.


	8. Remember You Were Mortal

A SYMPHONY OF immortal insanity rose towards its crescendo in the vastness of the cathedral. _Cathedral is too small a word_ , thought Lorgar Aurelian as he strode down a nave that stretched beyond the horizon in every direction, beneath a vaulted ceiling that depicted the Imperial domain in breathtaking, if centuries outdated, detail wasted on the poor vision of mortals who would look up and see only the larger details of the galactic disc. Lorgar raised _Illuminarum_ up and, with sweeping gesture and writhing word of power, opened a rift that tore across the fresco as the cicatrix maledictum had split the galaxy proper. The daemon-primarch’s aura flared with empyric fire as a tide of shrieking furies descended on the Sisters of Battle already being forced back by the divine zeal of the Word Bearers.  
  Emissaries of the Primordial Truth killed and were killed by slaves of a false god. Their prayers and praise, in life and death, added to the hymn. Soon, the blasphemous icon that was Ophelia VII would be reborn in the image of the pantheon of Chaos.  
  And yet… the notes did not play true. Lorgar stopped. He closed his eyes to the mundane reality of the battle, reaching out with his other senses. There was no discord to be found. Nothing that did not belong. _Nothing_. That was the key. It was the absence that betrayed it.  
  Lorgar returned to motion, wading into the fray as he focussed in on the silence that should not be. He swept aside a handful of Battle Sisters - and, in his haste, one of his own sons - and there they were. If the helms of the Silent Sisters had been fully enclosed, he would have sworn the silver armour must be empty, such was their utter wrongness to him. These soulless abominations would oppose the apotheosis of mankind out of petty jealousy that they could not partake in it _._  
As he had sought them out, so too they had fought towards him. One of them charged, swinging her execution blade in a high arc that would barely have reached his chest. Lorgar batted the blade aside with the haft of _Illuminarum_. One clawed hand shot out to grasp his would-be-killer. Mighty though he was, Lorgar shuddered at the pariah’s touch as he crushed her like an overripe fruit. The next Silent Sister was not so eager to die, squaring up to him with a blade even larger than the first. He was surprised to recognise her, and an unfamiliar feeling stirred alongside his revulsion.  
  “Lady Krole,” Lorgar slurred through a mouthful of razor-sharp fangs. It had been many millennia since he had defiled his tongue with the language of the False Imperium.  
  _Lorgar_. Jenetia Krole did not return the courtesy of a title, though he had many for her to choose from. Rather, the Thoughtmark gesture was punctuated to convey contempt individually tailored to his name. It stabbed into him like a consecrated knife.  
  “How can you defend this blasphemy, my lady?” he asked, sweeping his arm in a wide motion. Every surface was festooned with idolatry in in the name of a man who had denied His own divinity. “You know our father is no god.”  
  _Nor are your masters. I would sooner see the Imperium worship Him than them._  
  The daemon-primarch laughed, bringing the spiked head of _Illuminarum_ down in a blow that shattered the marble floor where Krole had stood a moment before. “Does the truth mean so little to you? You soulless creature, wrapping your lies in cursèd silence.”  
  _In silence, only truth remains_. Krole launched into a series of rapid strikes, lopping a spike off Lorgar’s weapon and carving a deep gouge up his arm as he fumbled a parry. Hellforged armour offered no resistance to the Sword of Oblivion’s edge. The wound in his arm troubled him more than it should, as if a fragment of her nothingness had seeped into his quintessence.  
  Lorgar stepped back, swinging wide to prevent his opponent from pressing her advantage. Just as he had expected, Krole rushed forward as soon as the mace passed her by. Lorgar matched her move, slamming a knee into her chest before she could bring her sword to bear from where it held guard against a return swing. He pinned her to the ground beneath one foot, feeling the burn of wards woven into the truesilver plate. The resistance was remarkable, but still it slowly bucked beneath his daemonic mass.  
  “I confess, I never understood how He could stand you,” Lorgar growled. Her presence, always uncomfortable at best, was elevated to existential horror by his ascension. As pain was the herald of death, this warned of… something else. Yet, somehow, the False Emperor had stood beside this anathema to all He was without seeming to notice.  
  The feeling increased and _Iluminarum_ , poised to crush the pariah’s head, fell from Lorgar’s grip. He reeled, watching the battle continue to unfold around him in eerie silence. Devoid of song. Devoid of soul. What had Krole done to him?  
  _Not just Krole_ , he realised. While they fought, the Battle Sisters had formed a cordon, selling their lives by the hundred to cut the daemon-primarch off from his sons. Granted this sanctuary, the Silent Sisters had come to their Knight-Commander’s aid. Lorgar was surrounded. Krole’s Raptor Guard were Oblivion Knights all, taught to focus their curse of soullessness. To weaponise their pariah gene. Under the combined weight of their silence, warp-fuelled strength bled from Lorgar’s body. He fell to his knees.  
  The Sword of Oblivion rose, but did not take his head. It carved into his chest, forming a mark that had never before been made. It belonged to no language, yet Lorgar comprehended its meaning. Though it could not be spoken, it was a word. A name.  
  Ashamed of their failed prophet, the pantheon turned their faces away. Lorgar looked to his sons - his monstrous, ruined sons _._ It had all been in vain. _All I ever wanted was the truth_ , he thought. A single tear rolled down his cheek before _Veracity_ took his once-immortal life.


	9. Suffering Silence

THE SILENCE BLED into every sense. The hateful creatures in silver armour should have shone brightly in the light of fire, explosions, and powered blades, but instead they seemed to leech the very colour from the world. Fulgrim eviscerated two of the Oblivion Knights with a single swing, his piercing shriek blunted by their presence. Even the taste of victory was insipid on his tongue. Their silence offended Slaanesh.  
  The daemon-primarch’s four blades moved faster than should have been possible, keeping the remaining eight knights and their dread commander at bay. Even still, Fulgrim felt sluggish as their convergent null auras strangled the flow of empyrean power. He should have been faster. That his enemy were able to parry even a single blow was a grievous wound to his martial pride.  
  From the corner of his eye, he saw an Oblivion Knight raise her execution blade. It was instantly obvious she would not be able to either land the blow or bring the blade down for a parry before Fulgrim struck. She died for her imperfection. Too late, Fulgrim realised he had made an error of his own.  
  One arm burned with a pain somehow devoid of sensation. He looked at the stump with disbelief and rage.Tendrils of half-corporeal matter tried to rise up out of the stream of purpure ichor to reform the hand, but the process was stymied by the Silent Sisters. Fulgrim’s serpentine tail whipped out, knocking three knights aside to free a blade for the one who had dared mar his beauty. Across ten millennia and the breadth of a galaxy filled with xenos horrors and the madness of the warp, she was the most disgusting thing Fulgrim had ever beheld. Jenetia Krole was so abhorrent to his senses that she seemed to disappear entirely whenever his focus strayed even slightly.  
  _Veracity_ , still wet with daemonic ichor, parried easily. It had been a clumsy strike, and Fulgrim knew it. It was indignant, impulsive. That was his second mistake. Krole held the giant blade one-handed, her other raising _Sinistra_ and putting a salvo of nitidus rounds into Fulgrim’s screaming face. The archaeotech rounds exploded in a flash of light.  
  Fulgrim writhed, his tail and three remaining blades swinging wildly. The nitidus rounds would have blinded any opponent, but for him - a creature of Chaos as much as flesh - the psychic vacuum they produced plunged him into his darkest nightmare. A world without sensation.  
  Krole ducked and weaved through the flailing limbs. _Sinistra_ was back in its holster, both hands on the Sword of Oblivion. The survivors of the Raptor Guard stabbed their execution blades into Fulgrim’s lashing tail and clashed their blades against his whenever they came in reach, whether or not they posed a threat.  
  It lasted only handful of seconds. In a face of horrific beauty now pockmarked by smoking craters and dripping with ichor, Fulgrim’s iridescent violet eyes opened to see Krole mid-leap, _Veracity_ \- his false father’s sword - arcing towards his neck. He tried to bring his blade up, but he was too slow.  
  Krole lifted the fallen head by lank, off-white hair. In the grip of the daemon-primarch’s soporific musk, many had professed him the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. The very image of perfection. Free of a soul’s lies, Krole saw only the sallow, sunken features of an addict who had sold himself to darkness in a vain attempt to make the ephemeral eternal. Her lips curled in disgust, and she cast it aside. The task was not yet done. It was not enough merely to send such foulness back to the empyrean.  
  She set about carving the marks that would unmake his quintessence. Unheard, Fulgrim’s ravaged soul screamed its last as the abyss of eternal silence claimed him.


	10. Speak No Evil

THIS CANNOT BE. Jenetia Krole signed slowly, not just to allow Navradaran to follow, but from shock at the sight of the pict in her hand. A space marine covered in hexagrammatic brands where older, blasphemous marks had been burned from his skin. He was crucified with silver nails, and the nubs of clipped horns jutted from above the lead band of a crown of blindness _._ _Who was fool enough to bring Erebus to Terra?_  
  Bound and warded though he was, as long as the Dark Apostle was alive he was a threat to the Imperium on a scale matched only by the fallen primarchs and the Warmaster himself. The tongue that launched a million ships in treachery had been brought to the throneworld and allowed to whisper its poison into the ears of the Inquisition.  
  _It matters not_ , Navradaran replied. Krole disagreed. _The fact is he is here._

Erebus grinned when he heard the door to his cell open. For all it sickened him to be cut off from the pantheon, he knew he was doing their work, and delighted in it. The blindness they subjected to him would pass, but the glory of Chaos was eternal. He listened for the tell-tale sounds that would give his visitor’s identity away. Whoever it was, they were completely silent even to his genhanced senses. Someone new, perhaps? Nothing would please him more. They knew they should not let him speak, and yet they came all the same. They could not help themselves. He wondered how many of those that had come alone had come in secret. If they thought that allowing him to spread his gospel thin across many Inquisitors was any safer than concentrating it in one, they were mistaken. The truth could not be contained by their petty, mortal will.  
  “I don’t believe we have met, Inquisitor.” Erebus affected what he imagined was a conversational tone. “I am Erebus, Apostle of the Primordial Truth and Bearer of the Word. Have you come to renounce your False Emperor, confess your sins, and embrace the eternal glory of Chaos?”  
  An armoured fist smashed into his jaw. Not an uncommon reaction. Erebus laughed. Nobody could fail to grasp that he would not be broken by a beating, not when they stood before the canvass of mutilated skin that served as testimony to his devotion every bit as much now as it had before the holy texts had been burned away by consecrated silver. Yet they lashed out in petty rage, these children. Even blind, he saw more than they.  
  It surprised him when he felt the crown of blindness lifted from his head. Many of his interrogators had been fools, but none had yet been outright suicidal. He reached out with his mind, and instantly regretted the decision. His soul recoiled from the starving abyss that stood before him, ready to swallow him whole. Not an inquisitor at all.  
  Before he could collect his thoughts to speak, she struck him again. Even millennia after their last encounter, the pall of dread that lived where Jenetia Krole’s soul should be was unmistakable. Her very existence was an affront to the pantheon.  
  Erebus spat out a mouthful of blood. He noted with satisfaction that it had not hit the floor, so must have struck Krole. A pity they had removed his Betcher’s Gland.  
  “All these years and you still harvest souls for your False Emperor. I wonder, do you think He appreciates it? Or does He hate you for every moment you prolong His suffering?”  
  She hit him again, and again, and again. Erebus laughed all the while.  
  “Can you hear Him screaming?”  
  Krole kept going. Punches slammed into him, splitting his burned skin to let black blood run free. At first, the wounds sealed almost as fast as they opened, but the relentless assault began to take its toll until he was drenched in hot gore. It was then that Erebus realised it wasn’t going to stop.  
  “You can kill the messenger,” he gasped, “but it does not alter the truth of the message.”  
  It took her hours to finally beat him to death. Still she didn’t stop - not until one hand, already raw and bleeding inside her gauntlet, finally broke under the strain. Krole breathed heavily, smiling darkly behind her silver faceplate. Taking an incendiary grenade from her belt with her unbroken hand, she set the timer and pushed it into his slack mouth. His serpent’s tongue would be the first part to burn.


	11. A Fool's Hope

I DIED HERE, thought the cyclops as the ash of his thrice-burned homeworld trickled through scarred fingers. Unarmoured and unclothed, every inch of his crimson skin was carven with wards and sigils that stirred echoes of a memory that was and was not his own. He knelt in the centre of a summoning circle, a silver Paladin at each of the cardinal points. One from each Brotherhood of the Grey Knights, they had passed their last trial with distinction - when tasked with banishing one of the six hundred and sixty-six most powerful daemons, they had taken it upon themselves to seek out one of the hundred and one daemons of the Conclave Diabolus. Today would be their greatest test.  
  Beyond the edge of the circle stood another figure in silver armour. Though smaller and slighter, she was far more intimidating. Where the Paladins acted as conduits for the empyric energy that blew across Prospero’s blasted surface, earthing it into the summoning circle through their planted Nemesis force swords, Jenetia Krole consumed it, drawing it in as a black hole swallowed light.  
  The last errant shard of Magnus the Red lifted his single eye to the heavens. He studied the tides that ebbed and flowed from the sickly bright scar across reality. He watched the waves batter the beacon of the Astronomican on disant Terra, desperate to smother it again. He turned his eye, at last, to Sortiarius. Crowned by damnation, Prospero’s dark twin had been drawn into reality by a single, shining strand of fate that tethered its Obsidian Tower to the place where once stood the Pyramid of Photep.  
  “It is time,” said Ianius in his bipartite voice. The stars were right.  
  Power drawn from the Great Rift flowed through the Paladins into the summoning circle, and into the being that was and was not Magnus. The strand snapped. The Paladins were hurled from their feet, smoke coiling from between the plates of blackened armour to join the cloud of dust thrown up by the impact. Krole didn’t even blink as the psychic blast wave passed her by like a gentle breeze. She stepped into the circle, aetheric currents parting in a bow wave before her.  
  In the centre of the circle, Ianius remained standing as convulsions wracked his body. When he opened his eye, it writhed with flames in innumerable shades of the colour of magick. He spoke now with one voice. The voice of Magnus the Red. “Jenetia. I confess I am surprised. I always thought it would be Leman, in the end.”  
  _Yet here we are_. It hurt Magnus’ eye to look at the gestures she made, their meaning searing into his mind through the medium of pain as much as sight. He forced himself to smile.  
  “Yet here we are, where it all began.”  
  _Not quite_.  
  Magnus looked up to the sky and saw the glimmer of a new, spectral strand. A future that might yet come to be. It led him to the Astronomican. “Of course,” he sighed. “Yes, I see it now.”  
  _You see, but do you understand?_  
  He did. He sensed the hope that Ianius had harboured in this scheme. He cast it aside. Once before he had sold his soul for hope. Never again. “The galaxy is burning,” he said. An old oath fulfilled. “Let it be my pyre.”  
  The Crimson King knelt before the Soulless Queen, and bared his neck for the execution blade. For destruction? For rebirth? He didn’t care anymore.

Across the galaxy, Navigators wept in awestruck wonder as the Astronomican flared with a pulse of light that, for a brief moment, could be glimpsed through the darkest storm.


End file.
